Spotless updates.
Here you’ll find our latest news, company updates, and events as well as some reviews of the latest trends and technology.
Service designers are often asked if their roles are visionary or practical, broad or technical. Should the service designer simply be a charismatic advocate of the “users-first” mantra, or should he be an experienced researcher with the ability to turn analysis into high-fidelity outcomes? The answer to this question is simply “yes”. While the definition of service design has yet to fully coalesce, one word that comes up in nearly every definition is “holistic”. Service design is concerned with end-to-end journeys; it takes a step back to view the forest. But it also sees every single leaf on every single…
“Keep Calm and Carry On”, the famous British motivational poster first espoused in 1939. Such messaging was thought up by the UK government to keep us proud of our stiff upper lip as we dealt with the drudgery of daily life. And we do. But the lives of those living in the UK have changed immeasurably since the advent of the famous poster, and the recent mid-winter NHS crises is reason to shake our Keep Calm attitude and start taking action in healthcare innovation. In 1942, we saw the birth of the National Health Service, a public institution framed as…
We recently welcomed a small group of second-year product design students from the Glasgow School of Art to view our studios and hear about what it’s like to work at Spotless. After a brief warm-up activity and introductions, our Service Designer (and GSA alum!) Hannah Steele led the conversation about our work and methods over breakfast. We highlighted a few of our key case studies and explained how we live up to our mission – to empower people to deliver innovation that matters – by working with a flexible, iterative design process driven by rigorous research. The product design course…
It’s highly likely you’ve watched a TED talk, sat through a powerpoint presentation, read Harvard Business Review or attended a workshop that contained buzzwords like empathy, collaboration, human-centred design, ideation, design thinking or service design. It’s easy to feel perplexed – are these methods, processes, mindsets, approaches or frameworks? In essence, these words are often used to describe activities: conducting user research to understand human needs, defining problems that needs solving, coming up with ideas, or putting users at the user at the heart of a product or service design. In this article I will be looking to clarify two…
Last year on 2nd August 2017, humans had already used up their allowance for water, soil, clean air and other resources on Earth for the whole of 2017, according to environmental groups WWF and the Global Footprint Network. This is known as ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ and the date last year was earlier than in 2016, which means humanity was surviving on “credit” until 31 December 2017. “This means that in seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than…
Good service design is user-centred, and calling games that encourage gambling behaviours “services” is ridiculously presumptuous, if not outright corrupt.
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